Tag: Mitrokhin Archive

Yesterday we mentioned the Mitrokhin Archive in Britain, which contains 25,000 pages of information about high-profile Western figures who served as KGB spies and contacts during the Cold War. As we noted, some Western officials and journalists have examined these documents with an eye to uncovering the dark side of their own countries’ modern history; in Norway, however, the government and media – knowing that publicizing the facts would cause serious damage to that country’s powerful Labor Party – have essentially collaborated for years to keep a lid on those facts.

Einar Gerhardsen

So things stood, more or less, until late December 2015, when Norway’s TV2 reported that it had commissioned Åsmund Egge, a professor emeritus at the University of Oslo, to look through the archive. Among the high-ranking Norwegians whose names turned up was Einar Gerhardsen (1897-1987), a Labor Party politician who served as Prime Minister from 1945 to 1951, 1955 to 1963, and 1963 to 1965. It was Gerhardsen, fondly referred to as “Landsfaderen” (Father of the Nation), who oversaw the introduction of Norway’s postwar welfare state. According to the archive, he supplied confidential documents to the KGB, which gave him the code name “Jan.”

Johan Strand Johansen

Two of Gerhardsen’s cabinet members also worked for the Soviets, both of them as out-and-out KGB agents. One was Johan Strand Johansen, a Communist Party member who spent eight years (1945-49; 1954-57) in Parliament, served as Minister of Labor under Gerhardsen in 1945, moved to Moscow in 1957, and lived there until his death in 1970. The other KGB agent in the cabinet was economist Gunnar Bøe (1917-1989), a top academic and Labor Party member who from 1959 to 1962 served as Minister of Pay and Prices. Norwegian intelligence long suspected Bøe was a Kremlin operative, but wasn’t able to come up with enough evidence to arrest him.

Einar Førde

Several more Norwegian politicians, journalists, and military officers who worked with the KGB were identified in Mitrokhin’s archive only by code names and thumbnail descriptions. Egge and TV2 have managed to figure out who some of them were, and to make educated guesses at others.One figure who’s been identified as a likely spy is Einar Førde (1943-2004), a Labor Party politician who was Minister of Education and Church Affairs from 1979 to 1981 and director-general of the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) from 1989 to 2001. For several years, in other words, the education of children in Norway and then the dissemination of news throughout the country were under the direction of a KGB man.

In December 2015, Hans Rustad wrote at document.no that TV2’s revelations amounted to “a political earthquake.” They were so sensational, in fact, that – once again – most of the country’s mainstream media chose not to report on them at all.

When KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin (1922-2004) moved to the U.K. in 1992, he took with him 25,000 pages crammed with information about Soviet espionage activities going back to the 1930s. This trove, known as the Mitrokhin Archive, has provided the material for several books, beginning with The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB (1999) by Mitrokhin and historian Christopher Andrew.

In several countries, the information contained in the archive made sensational headlines and led to official investigations and trials. The Danish government, for example, funded a Centre for Cold War Studies at the University of Southern Denmark, which spent years exploring the Mitrokhin Archive and other records. The result: a 1500-page report that detailed the extent of Soviet infiltration into Danish institutions (but redacted all names). In Denmark, these revelations received extensive media coverage.

In at least one country, however, the authorities showed no interested whatsoever in exploring or publicizing the contents of the Mitrokhin Archives. We’re talking about a country that was a founding member of NATO and that is one of the most prosperous on the planet – but whose cultural elite consists disproportionately of longtime (or supposedly former) Communists.

In a word: Norway.

Arne Treholt

As new-media journalist Hans Rustad pointed out in a recent article on his widely read alternative website, document.no, the Norwegian press has been more preoccupied with trying to whitewash Arne Treholt – a Labor Party politician and diplomat convicted in the 1980s for high treason and espionage – than with uncovering the names of other Norwegians who worked for the KGB.

Jens Stoltenberg

To be sure, there have been isolated efforts in Norway to make public some of the discoveries made in the Mitrokhin Archive. In 2000, TV journalist Alf R. Jacobsen revealed that back in 1989, the Norwegian police had learned that the KGB had cultivated Jens Stoltenberg, who was then “a young and very ambitious Labor Party politician” and who in 2000 was Prime Minister of Norway. (He is now Secretary-General of NATO.) Jacobsen’s report was condemned not only by Stoltenberg but, as Jacobsen recalled in 2011, by “pretty much all of the press’s leading commentators.” Among those who gave Jacobsen the cold shoulder was his boss, Einar Førde, “who himself had a suspect relationship to the KGB.” Meanwhile the Labor-friendly folks at the nation’s main evening news program did their best to deep-six the story.

Thorbjørn Jagland

In 2001, Norway’s largest newspaper, VG,reported on a forthcoming book that would divulge previously unreported information about Labor Party politicians’ Cold War-era KGB ties; ten years later, in 2011, another major daily, Dagbladet,reported that the book’s publication had been stopped by Labor Party leaders – and that some former KGB spies were still employed in both the Foreign Ministry and Labor Party. The media establishment responded to this revelation, too, by trying to discredit it. The book was reportedly suppressed by Thorbjørn Jagland, a Labor Party pol and former Prime Minister who in 2001 was Minister of Foreign Affairs – and who was, as it happens, one of those named in the book as KGB informants. (Jagland, famous in the U.S. mainly as the man behind Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize, is currently Secretary-General of the Council of Europe.)

Yesterday we discussed George Orwell’s 1949 list of literary and journalistic colleagues whom he viewed as “crypto-communists, fellow travellers or inclined that way.” Among them, we pointed out, was New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty, who at the time was considered the ultimate authority on the Soviet Union – but whose name has since become synonymous with shameless journalistic dishonesty and the systematic whitewashing of tyranny.

George Orwell

Another name on Orwell’s list was that of Peter Smollett. Born in Vienna in 1912 as Hans Peter Smolka, he relocated in 1933 to Britain, where, according to writer Daniel J. Leab, he “wrote pro-Soviet travel journalism for various US outlet during the 1930s, became a naturalized British subject in 1938, changed his name, and after the war’s outbreak joined the Ministry of Information, where he energetically organized pro-Soviet propaganda and suppressed ‘unfavorable comment’ on Stalinist Russia.”

His titleat the Ministry was Head of Soviet Relations. At the height of the war, when Orwell sent Animal Farm, his classic indictment of Soviet Communism, around to various publishers, one of them, Jonathan Cape, was “reported to be initially keen on the manuscript,” but “bowed out after consulting an ‘important official’ at the Ministry of Information, who advised against publication.” That official was Peter Smollett. On his list, Orwell described Smollett as “a very slimy person” who was “almost certainly [an] agent of some kind.”

Kim Philby’s 1990 USSR commemorative stamp

He was right. After his death in 1980, Smollett/Smolka was revealed to have been an agent of the NKVD, the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, which, in addition to performing espionage, ran the Gulag labor camps, conducted mass executions, and carried out mass deportations of various minorities and farmers. The Mitrokhin Archive, which we discussed a while back, records that Smollett was recruited as a spy in 1939 by double agent Kim Philby, one of the notorious Cambridge Five, and that his NKVD cover name was ABO. Smollett’s wartime NKVD work, notesHenry Hemming, “was held in high regard by Moscow.” Not only did he pass top-secret information on to the Kremlin (working first under Philby and later under another one of the Cambridge Five, Guy Burgess); he was also an invaluable pro-Soviet propagandist. In communications to higher-ups at the Ministry,

Guy Burgess in Moscow, 1956, after his defection to the USSR

Smollett would exaggerate Soviet concerns, refuse to give in to them and then suggest as a quid pro quo a more Soviet-friendly stance on other issues. He maintained, for example, that the Soviets were exceptionally thin-skinned and, as such, no stories about Stalinist persecution could be broadcast. Smollett encouraged the BBC to run stories that exaggerated the revival of the Russian Orthodox Church in the USSR….Elsewhere Smollett pushed the idea that after the war the USSR would be too weak to do anything other than rebuild.

The result of Smollett’s efforts was substantial. Hemming describes it as a “red haze” that “swept over Britain after the entry of the USSR into the war.” What he means is that Britain, thanks in large part to Smollett’s initiatives, was given a consistently prettified image of life under Stalin. As Hemming puts it, Smollett “helped to blur the line between the heroic Russians and the brutal Soviet regime.”

Smollett, Hemming points out, “was not unmasked during his lifetime, and instead enjoyed a successful post-war career as a respected Times correspondent and was even awarded an OBE.” But Orwell knew.